Stolen Child
by AIs4Awsome
Summary: Jenny's life is turned upside down after her parents messy divorce. Forced into spending the summer with her father and new stepmother, she becomes reacquainted with a childhood friend that may or may not have become something more sinister. Bad summary I know...The story is much better, cross my heart and kiss my elbow.
1. Chapter 1

**A.N: so not a whole lot happens in this chapter but it gets better promise :) I have about three or four chapters already written and ready to go so just say the word and I'll post 'em! p.s. PLEASE REVIEW! **

THE HALL

"Come away, O human child/to the waters and the wild/with our faery hand in hand/for the world's more full of weeping/than you can understand." -Yeats

ONE

It was a strange sultry summer, the summer I found myself standing at the tiny train station that bordered the sleepy unassuming village of Pendleton. It was hot as all hell and the early July heat was like a solid thing, as deep as quarry water. Sticky drops of perspiration dripped down my back, one by one, like slow insects while my shoes - fancy black patent leather jobs that only _just_ fit my larger-than-thou size nine and a half feet - had turned my toes and heels into screaming, pulsating, blistering agony. I clutched a half-lit Marlboro in one hand and a heaving suitcase in the other and looked towards the coming summer months with a gnawing sense of dread.

The Divorce had just become final and Dad had gotten his wish and married his editor, Sylvia Wallis. I'm stupid about divorces. The idea of a divorce makes me sick, and that's all there was to read in the local papers; "_Bestselling Authors Messy Divorce Final; Elopes with Harper & Co. Editor To Scottish Highlands_." I couldn't escape it; the goggle-eyed headlines were everywhere - staring back at me from every street corner and musty smelling tube entrance. And then there was that ghastly photo of Dad and Sylvia on honeymoon in Scotland, blown up to epic proportions and stamped across the cover of every fucking _Post _in the country; Dad wearing an easy smile and ill-fitting suit with a smug looking Sylvia standing primly at his side, a nauseating floral dress - ten years too young for her - hanging off her emaciated frame. She had a skeletal arm draped possessively over Dad's shoulder and a smirk plastered across her puggish features as she held a claw-like hand out to the camera, showing off her larger-than-life engagement ring. Even in black and white I could see the haughty self-important expression in her eyes that I would soon come to loathe.

Of course, everyone at St. Mary's saw the wretched picture, read the full story in the papers. Teachers took me aside in the middle of class "for a chat" and asked me if I "needed someone to talk to" while the girls who'd ignored me since year eight suddenly began inviting me to things that I never would have been invited to otherwise. It was as if I had a flashing neon sign over my head that read PRODUCT OF DIVORCE and everyone felt it was their God-given duty to save me in some way, as if they were all secretly expecting me to pull a Sylvia Plath the minute their backs were turned. _("Quick, invite Jenny round to Sarah's before she shoves her head in an oven!"). _I knew they felt sorry for me, caught in the cross wires of my parents painfully public divorce, but I also knew I brought a sort of morbid intrigue into their tedious lives. These girls, the girls that I went to boarding school with, came a dime a dozen; imported from all over the country with wealthy, scholarly families much like my own. They were bored, bored as hell. Bored with yachts and bored with summer holidays in the south of France, and bored with boys with important sounding names like William Charles Paddington-Lee the Third. My family was the antithesis of their perfect, predictable lives and it was because of this (not to mention the sudden, earth shattering divorce and Dad's scandalous, news making affair) that I was thrust, albeit unwillingly, into the spotlight, The Girl With The Fucked Up Home Life. It was only marginally better than being known as The Girl Whose Father Wrote That Weird Book On King James' Home-Erotic Tendencies.

Now that school was finally finished, I had an entire holiday with Dad and Sylvia at Carter Hall - the Davies summer home Dad had won in the divorce settlement - to look forward to;

I hadn't been to the Hall in nearly five years, since I was forced into taking as many summer writing programs as Dad could get me into through his prestigious literary connections. Unfortunately, I no longer had the excuse of extra credit courses to keep me away and I couldn't stay with my older brother Andrew - who was currently in the midst of "finding himself " in East Asia - and I sure as hell couldn't stay with Mum. She was going to be spending her summer at the flat in London, as far away from Dad as she could manage without actually taking the plunge and leaving the country all together. Her plan was to begin work on an ambitious new piece for the Tate Gallery and needed some "much needed peace and quiet" -her words, not mine - to pull it off. In my opinion, this was absolute horseshit considering she had all the peace and quiet she needed the other nine months of the year I was away at school. Unfortunately, my argument was dually shot to hell when Dad played the happy families "You and Sylvia could use the quality bonding time" card. Dear Lord.

Of course, the only thing worse than spending the summer in such close proximity with Sylvia was probably spending the summer with my younger, artistic sister Kitty as well.


	2. Chapter 2

"Is it just me or did you somehow manage to get taller since last Christmas?" Kitty placed her hands on my shoulders, craned her neck back and screwed up her cornflower blue eyes into tiny slits, staring me up and down. "And...wait a minute." she paused, sniffed the air between us. "Oh, Jenny, don't tell me you started smoking again - that awful stuff'll give you cancer, you know."

Kitty was sixteen, small, dark and tanned a Bermuda brown from spending long afternoons on the tennis court. With her dark bouncing curls, wraith-like frame and talent for aesthetics, Kitty was Mum's favorite. I, on the hand, had inherited Dads fair coloring, above average height, and interest in literature. It was Dad, not Mum, who had pushed me to apply to Cambridge and read English.

"You didn't drive here by yourself, did you?" I asked, brushing her off and nodding towards the rusted up Ford she'd parked awkwardly alongside the road.

"Uh huh. Dad let me use Jackson's car." she said with obvious pride in her voice.

"Well, he wasn't going to bloody well let you drive the Rover."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. How have things been with Sylvia?"

Kitty shot me a slow, hot grin over the car's sizzling roof.

"Absolutley horrid. It's only been a week and already I want to strangle her."

She unlocked the door of the backseat and I threw my cello case and luggage in. It smelt like gasoline and mint and stale Pall Malls, not entirely unpleasant.

"You ought to see how she bosses Dad around." she continued gleefully as I slammed the door with a resounding bang that echoed off the surrounding hills. I climbed in on the passenger side and Kitty pulled herself into the drivers seat, shoved the key into the ignition.

It's _so_ embarrassing." she yelled over the sound of the engine sputtering to life, "And she brought those ridiculous pugs with her. Their not even house trained! One's already ruined the oriental rug in Dad's study - you know that one he got at Christies, the one that belonged to Sir John whatsit?"

She was pressing firmly on the gas now and looked from the front windshield to her foot, clearly confused as to why we weren't moving.

"Kitty, it's still in park."

"What?"

"The car," I indicated to the stick shift, "it's still in park. That's why we're not going anywhere."

"Oh. Right." she gave an awkward laugh and I could see the sudden color rise into her neck and cheeks. As she slammed her fist against the stick shift and the break released, the car made an unhealthy sounding noise, the sort of noise a dying man might make on his death bed. She slammed her foot on the gas, gave the steering wheel a sharp jerk, and the car wheezed onto the road in a spray of mud and gravel. Not once did Kitty glance in her mirrors or shoulder check. The thought _I'm going to be dead before we make it the Hall _began to go round and round at the back of my skull like a morbid merry go round . Wonderful.

"You were saying?" I prompted.

"Right. If Dad makes a fuss over the dogs Sylvia just goes off about how he can't possibly consider parting her from her poor little darlings, or some other shite like that, even though everyone knows he's allergic to dogs. Of course, he let's her win and she gets to keep the stupid things! Can you believe that?"

"And hows Tabby dealing with all this?" I asked, referring to the Hall's long suffering housekeeper.

" I think she's going to have to talk Dad into giving her a raise since I doubt her current salary'll be able to pay for the years of therapy she's going to need by the end of this summer."

"Don't be dramatic, Kitty." I said stonily, giving another eye roll.

But Kitty just continued as if I hadn't said anything, "I don't know if I should be saying this..."

"Then don't."

"- But I really think everyone's beginning to miss Mum. She was a pain, but at least she kept out of the way in her studio. Oh, by the way, I've taken it over - Mum's old studio, I mean."

"Dad let you?" I asked, my eyebrows shooting up in disbelief. Since Mum had converted the empty space over the carriage house into a studio five summers ago it had become something of her own private retreat, a place where she could escape from Dad and us kids and paint in peace. Mum had created some of her best work in that studio and it was her pride and joy.

"Yeah, why wouldn't he? It's not as if Mum's round to stop him or anything." Kitty said with a sort of smug, decided air that made me want to reach out over the console between us and slap her. Instead, I pulled out another Marlboro, made a big show of lighting it and snapped "_Kitty_!" in my best "I-wear-the-knickers-in-this-relationship" voice.

"What? It's true, isn't it?" then, seeing the cigarette, "Oh for God's sake, put that out, Jenny. You're going to make everything smell like smoke and I just washed my hair this morning."

I rolled my eyes and took another drag, let the thin trails of smoke leak slowly from my nostrils so they veiled my eyes.

"Your lungs are going to sound like a barn full of owls by the time your thirty, you _do_ know that?" she snapped indignitley when I made no motion of putting it out.

"_Hoot. Hoot_." I said, flat as pan.

Kitty pressed her lips into a firm line, stared ahead with almost dumb concentration. She didn't say anything.

I rolled my window down to flick out the dirt-like ash of my cigarette and immediately the faint leathery scent of cow manure filled my nostrils. It was always present here, except for the coldest days, and noticeable only to those - such as myself - who had been away for a long time. Ahead of us, the desolate road seemed to stretch on forever, looping the wild purple moors and surrounding hills like a ribbon. The whole thing looked like something straight out of a Bronte novel - only I'd never really been keen on the Bronte Bunch.

Between drags, I found myself asking,

"So how is everyone - Jackson, and Sam and the lot ?"

Kitty pulled her thin shoulders up into a half shrug, made a too-sharp turn onto the main road that would've sent me flying if I hadn't made sure to buckle my seatbelt. She didn't bother signalling.

"Jackson's alright, busy as hell, though. Sylvia's got him ripping up the front gardens - apparently she wants to redesign the whole bloody thing, plant nothing but boring ol' camelias. I mean, _honestly_. What a -"

"Kitty, road." I reminded her as she began to absent mindedly veer the Ford into the other lane.

"Right. Sorry." she mumbled and yanked the wheel sharply to the right. I could hear the slippery sound of my cello case sliding from one side of the backseat to the other. "Anyway, Dad said Sam's in Europe for the summer. Pity you won't get a chance to see him now that you're finally back. It's been what, four, five years now?"

"Something like that."

"Too bad. You two were practically inseparable, remember?"

"Suppose."

"You know he came round a couple times last summer." she said. Then, sounding thoughtful, "Didn't I tell you that already?"

"Yes - you tried getting him to set you up with one of his mates from school and he put you on a blind date with some wall eyed chap who looked like he had rabies and wouldn't foot the bill." I said impatiently. I'd heard this story at least fifty times over the Christmas holidays.

"Right. It was absolutely wicked of him, too, since he _knows_ St. Agatha's is an all-girls school and the only time I ever have any contact with the opposite sex is when those awful boys from Kinghorn come round for dances. Oh, stop smiling, Jenny. It's not funny" she snapped when she noticed the corner of my mouth beginning to twitch. "Anyway, last time he came round he didn't even ask about you or anything. Was rather strange, actually. Reckon he forgot about you?"

"Perhaps."

I'd known Sam since I was seven and he and Andrew were ten. He lived with his shut-in aunt in a small cottage down the road from us and had gotten into the habit early on of coming round every summer to play with Andrew and me in the dense forest that stretched between our houses. He was the unofficial Charles Baker Harris to our Scout and Jem Finch.

To be honest, Sam was unlike any boy I've met before or since. He had the strangest eyes - brilliant green, hard and polished and indestructible - and even as a kid he had a mouth that always seemed to be set into a permanent sneer. I don't mean an unkind, nasty sneer, but an amused, mysterious sneer, as if he thought everyone else was a sort of joke. He really was wonderfully funny; whenever Dad would bring his writer friends - usually balding old men who wore ugly tweed suits and smoked fat Cuban cigars and reeked of expensive aftershave - round for drinks in the evening, we'd hide out in the kitchen and Sam would make witty, clever remarks about the company. Tabby would tell me and Andrew at the beginning of ever summer that we "ought to take care round Sam"; she often claimed to anyone who'd listened that she had the uneasy feeling there was something slightly off about him. I knew some of the older, superstitious people in the village -and there were quite a few- would joke, half serious, half not, that he was a changeling - a faery child left in the place of a human child - but I always thought that was absolute rubbish. I think some parents in the village took the old people's musings seriously because they kept their children well away from Sam, afraid that his strangeness might rub off on them like a bad case of chicken pox. Five years later and now Sam Tamill had become little more than a vague, lingering shadow from my now distant past, one that I found myself occasionally asking after, more out of routine than anything. We had fallen out of touch only months after my final summer at the Hall. Kitty, home from her prestigious arts school every summer, was the only one who kept in regular contact with him, despite the fact that he wasn't nearly as close to her as he had been with me and Andrew.

"Oh well. Suppose it's for the best." Kitty said with a shrug, "Doubt Sylvia would've liked him much. Then again, I don't think Sylvia's really keen on_ anyone_, except for maybe Dad, of course. After all she did marry him, the poor bastard."

"Poor bastard, indeed." I muttered.


	3. Chapter 3

Carter Hall seemed to grow organically from it's own sloping hill at the end of a long, secluded drive that twisted and turned through a thick copse of elm and oak trees. The cheery yellow stone walls of the large house gleamed in the sun and the mullioned windows reflected the manicured front lawns that sprawled like wide green domes, broken up only by the carefully tended flower beds. The whole thing looked exactly as how I'd remembered it; secrete and silent and unchanged by the endless march of time. The hall was originally built by a soon-to-be-ruined Cromwell in the late sixteen hundreds and didn't come into Davies family possession until the late nineteen thirties, just before the war. In the sixties some pretentious fuss pot from America wrote an article on it and declared it the single ugliest manor house in all of Yorkshire; Dad, of course, had the article framed and hung in pride-of-place over the mantle piece in his study.

As Kitty and I approached, the thick summer heat bore down on us and over the crunch of the white gravel beneath the car's tires I could hear the tell-tale hum of cicadas. My stomach knotted itself into nothing and I found myself twisting my fingers anxiously in my lap. Kitty must have noticed because she said, "Can't you relax? Your starting to make _me_ nervous and I've already met the woman, for God's sake. You look as if your going to meet a firing squad."

"Last meal and a cigarette might help." I said and reached for my packet of Marlboro's again. Kitty gave my hand a stinging slap, sending the packet flying to the rubber-matted floor of the car.

"Hey!"

"Don't let Sylvia see you with that." she warned. "She caught Dad with his evening cigar the other night and nearly busted a capillary. Apparently the smoke wilts the camelias - absolute shite if you ask me."

"Would've saved this family a good lot of trouble if she had." I grumbled bleakly, already mourning the cigarette.

"Really, Jenny, couldn't you put off smoking until _after _you've become one of those cynical writers who wear all black and read Tolstoy in shady little cafes? You're acting like - Oh God, there's Sylvia." Kitty jutted out her chin and gestured towards the direction of the manors east wing. Sure enough, there stood Sylvia Wallis-Davies, our new stepmother, standing tyrannically over Jackson while he appeared to be mucking about miserably in one of the flower beds. She had a big white tooth paste ad smile pasted across her pointy face and held a hand up stiffly in greeting, just like the bloody Queen.

"Better buck up and smile, Jenny." Kitty said, setting her teeth into a stiff grin. She waved back.

"I don't feel like smiling."

Kitty rolled her eyes.

"You're English. _Fake it_."

I tried but my mouth wouldn't go. Four years of analyzing the hell out of Charlotte Bronte novels, John Keats poems and T.S. Eliot essays had ill prepared me for the event of meeting the woman who had single handedly broken up my parents twenty-five year marriage. I now found myself struggling to react.

Finally I said, "She doesn't look so bad." And she really didn't. In her neat summer dress and heels, Sylvia looked like one of those cool, elegant, sophisticated types that do nothing but shop and go to fancy dinner parties and lie around reading impressive sounding books.

"Jenny, darling, you're _much_ too bright to be making stupid observations like that." Kitty said in that simpering "Yes, yes you are mentally retarded," voice I absolutely hate. She hastily cut the engine and began going through the motions of unbuckling her seatbelt.

I turned to see Sylvia striding across the lawn towards us. The horrid PR smile stubbornly refused to leave her face. Her teeth were huge and gleaming and reminded me of tombstones.

"Looks like she's coming over." I said.

Kitty grumbled something under her breath, something I was only just able to catch the tail-end of; " - _swotty old cow_." I forced my mouth into something that I hoped resembled a smile and got out of the car. Kitty followed and I saw she had pasted the stilted grin back on her face. We looked like two talentless actors fumbling through a poorly written play, awkwardly standing there in front of the house, unsure of what to do next while sweating and smiling stupidly at Sylvia.

"You must be Jennifer." Sylvia said in a clipped tone , walking over and holding out a bony, manicured hand in an almost business like manner. My stomach dropped as I registered her accent.

Before I could stop myself, the words "You're American." came tumbling from my mouth like water. Kitty made a low hissing noise and gave me a sharp jab in the ribs with her elbow. The waxen smile still refused leave Kitty's face and for one awful moment I thought maybe she'd been smiling too long and now her face was permanently stuck like that.

"I'm sorry?" Sylvia asked, the PR smile quickly vanishing. Her hand dropped to her side like a stone. She narrowed her pebble colored eyes at me accusingly. Seeing her in such a close proximity, I realized they were as cool and unfeeling as agate marble. She was also older than I first thought, maybe in her mid-fifties, and her skin was sort of tight looking, as if she'd had work done. I could tell her heavily lacquered black hair was beginning to go grey and she was thin, almost too thin. Her dress -no doubt some expensive designer job- was tailored to perfection and fit her like a glove. A garrishly huge jewled brooch in the shape of a panther was pinned to the front of her dress, catching the sunlight, and all I could do was stare at it dumbly while mentally guessing how much a thing like that would go for. Probably a hell of a lot. Just as I was stupidly wondering if Dad had maybe given it to her , I heard a someone call my name from somewhere behind me.

"_Jenny_!"

I dragged my eyes from the panther brooch and turned round to see Dad coming from the direction of the greenhouse, arms outstretched. immediately I could see from the way that his work clothes hung loosely from his body that that he had lost a fair amount of weight since last Christmas. He had also shaved off his beard. Dad always had a beard; Mum said it worked for his university proffesor-turned-eccentric writer image that he was always trying to uphold; sort of like a modern-day Oscar Wilde ,without the homosexual tendencies. Seeing my father suddenly beardless was like seeing him naked.

"So the prodigal daughter returns to the country cottage at last." he said, walking over. Dad's smile seemed to be the only genuine one out of the lot of us. He effulged me in a big bear hug, so tight that my nose pressed firmy into his shoulder. Dad must've marinated himself in a tub of Ralph Lauren this morning because I found myself struggling to breathe through the thick wall of heavy cologne that seemed to surround him like an aura. He took a sudden step back, frowned.

"Is that..?" he paused and sniffed audibly. _Oh damn_. "Is that cigarettes I smell?"

"The bloke who sat next to me on the train smoked like a chimney." I said quickly, "Made the whole compartment stink."

"Funny, I thought smoking wasn't allowed on -." I glanced over my shoulder and silenced Kitty with a look that would've withered a houseplant.

"Nevermind," Dad said, waving a hand infront of his face as if he was shooing away a pesky fly, "Jenny, darling, I'd like to formally introduce you to my new wife - Sylvia Wallis-Davies." he said, taking Syvia's hand and giving it a small squeeze "God, I _do_ like the sound of that." The sudden overwhelming urge to vomit hit me like a lorry.

The scowl that had been on Sylvia's face only moments before had completely materialized. "Delighted." she said, voice cool and imperious. "My Jim talks about you _constantly_."

"Rather annoying, actually." Kitty mumbled, just barely audible. I was too busy inwardly prickling over the subtle emphasis Sylvia had put on the word _my_ to notice.

"I understand you want to be an author like your father." she went on in an overly confident tone.

"Not entirely." I said carefully. "I mean, I want to write, just not really mysteries. More like nonfiction, that sort of thing."

"Why ever not? There's a good market in mystery writing, _I_ should know."she said, flicking an imaginary piece of lint from the front of her dress.

"Sylvia's a marvelous editor." Dad said, draping an arm round her thin shoulders. "Perhaps she could look over some of _your_ work, Jenny, give you some pointers. Got to get that writing up to snuff for Cambridge, you know."

"Perhaps." I said, trying to make my voice sound as non-committal as possible.

The mere thought of showing Sylvia the short stories I'd written at school suddenly made me want to turn round and run back to the train station screaming blue murder.

"Right, then." Dad said briskly, clapping his hands together, "Shall we?"

"Of course." Syvlia smiled then, "Jackson! _Jackson!" _I saw Kitty wince. A haggard looking Jackson looked up from where he was planting a row of stark-looking camellias. A thick line of sweat beaded his upper lip. "Kindly bring Jenna's things up to the nursery."

"It's Jenny."

Sylvia patted me delicately on the shoulder. "Of course it is, darling." Was it just me or did I hear the slightest note of condescension in her voice? Dad didn't seem to notice.

Then it dawned on me."Wait, why can't I stay in my old room?"

"Sylvia's turned it into a boudoir." Kitty said out of the corner of her mouth. "Chintz everywhere - positively ghastly."

Oh God.


End file.
